Esquire Live Sessions: The Meat Puppets on Their Nirvana Unplugged Performance

In honor of the twentieth anniversary of Nirvana's Unplugged, here is a performance and interview from the band that played with them, the Meat Puppets, originally part of Nirvana Week on Esquire.com.

The Meat Puppets have been around and playing successfully, in one form or another, since 1980. Their boost into mainstream pop-culture consciousness, however, came when the band did a tour opening for Nirvana in 1993 and appeared on their MTV Unplugged performance and album, which included three Puppets songs, one of them being "Lake of Fire," which the Puppets performed for this special Esquire Live Session. We sat down with founding member Curt Kirkwood afterward to discuss the two bands' brief and fateful intersection.

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Click herefor a special Nirvana Week Spotify playlist tailored to this story, or just scroll to the bottom and hit play.

ESQUIRE.COM: So how did you guys come to play with Nirvana at the MTV Unplugged gig?

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CURT KIRKWOOD: They asked us to go out on tour with them in the fall supportingIn Utero, so we did two or three weeks with them and kinda got to know them a little bit. Then Kurt said they were going to go and do that Unplugged thing, and would we come up 'cause they wanted to play three of our songs and wanted us to play on them. It was pretty simple.

ESQ: What was it like to be around Nirvana at that time? Were they rockstars, or was it just like being around a bunch of regular guys?

CK: They were similar to us, definitely a little more rustic than the average musician. Us being from Phoenix, that's a big town, but it's kind of in the middle of nowhere, and they were from a smaller place up in Washington, at least two of 'em, and they were real lowkey. It was real easy to hang out with 'em. You know, they were musicians primarily as opposed to stage performers. Just like how a lot of bands start out, you get together with your buddies and you play in a garage and that's what it is.

ESQ: Your influence on Nirvana is something they've talked about. Did they influence you at all?

CK: It goes both ways. I definitely think they were very secure in what they were doing and we were as well in our own little world. We'd been doing it for quite a while by then, and we were a little bit different of a band. We always jammed out a lot more and messed around with a lot of different structures. Though they did, too, if you hear the basement tapes and stuff. In the early '90s we were playing a lot of bigger shows opening for them and Blind Melon, Soul Asylum, Stone Temple Pilots... We hit bigger stages so we started playing more anthemic stuff to respond to the bigger spaces. I think that was an influence. You know, I was influenced by the energy. Being around musicians like that, especially when there's a lot of a buzz, it's different. It kind of folds itself into my worship of Hollywood, although they weren't a Hollywood thing. It's not just Hollywood; it goes back even further. It goes back to Disneyland with me, and Disney was always my first influence that I can trace. I love the music, I love the cartoons, I love the Land — it's a multimedia thing, you know? When you're around those people and see how they operate sometimes you can't help but be influenced by their music or their aura or whatever it is. It's a pretty typical thing.

ESQ: When you heard that Kurt had passed away, what was your response? You probably knew him on a much more personal level than so many people.

CK: I was pretty blown away. I thought it was awful, you now? Really, really sad, and that's about it. I felt like I was just getting started to get to know him, and that had started off on a really good note. The work we did together on Unplugged was really good. I had a lot of respect for him as an artist and thought he was a real good guy, so I was bummed out. You could sense the loss in a lot of people.

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